CSI ObamaCare: Affordable Care Act To Have Own Police

Police State: The administration is building a detective squad that will target consumers and companies that don't follow ObamaCare's rules. The game of "good cop, bad cop" has arrived in American health care.

It was bad enough to know that an Internal Revenue Service that targets the political opponents of the Obama administration between partying on the taxpayer dime would be in charge of monitoring compliance with ObamaCare's individual mandate via our tax returns.

Now, the Daily Mail, which lodged a Freedom of Information Act with Health and Human Services, reports that the agency has hired a bevy of criminal investigators as we continue to learn what is in the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act.

Never did we imagine that buying insurance and going to the doctor or providing coverage to employees would come under the full-time purview of federal criminal investigators.

On the day in 2010 that President Obama signed the bill into law, HHS got authority from the Office of Personnel Management to make as many as 1,814 new hires under an emergency "Direct Hiring Authority" order.

The agency was authorized to hire 50 criminal investigators to ensure compliance with mandatory provisions and regulations. But as is typical with an administration with no respect for the Constitution and the law, HHS unilaterally upped that number to 86.

Of course these investigators won't be digging into the Obama administration's lack of compliance with its own law. A president doesn't have the legal authority to decide what parts of the law he wants to obey; the Constitution does not grant him that authority.

But that's exactly what Obama is doing with Obama-Care.

As noted in Forbes, first there was the delay of ObamaCare's Medicare cuts until after the election. Then there was the delay of the law's employer mandate.

After that there was the announcement, buried in the Federal Register, that the administration would delay enforcement of a number of key eligibility requirements for the law's health insurance subsidies, relying on the "honor system" instead.

Now comes word that another costly provision of the health law — its caps on out-of-pocket insurance costs — will be postponed for one more year.

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of November 2011, the administration had missed as many as a third of Affordable Care Act's deadlines specified by law. Adhering to the law, apparently, is of no concern to an administration that hires criminal investigators to make sure we accede to it.

See Also

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Entitlements: Medicare's latest annual report, issued days before its 50th anniversary, seems to show that, thanks to ObamaCare, it has a long and healthy future in front of it. But it's not true. Not by a long shot.President Obama's top economists, Jeff Zients and Jason Furman, claim that the new ...

Health Reform: Before ObamaCare, it would've been hard to find a health plan that combined a huge $6,000 deductible, few in-network doctors, and sky-high premiums. Today, thanks to ObamaCare, it's hard not to.A new report from Avalere Health finds that enrollees in ObamaCare plans have access to ...

Integrity: An undercover operation shows how ridiculously easy it is to defraud ObamaCare. Even after officials learned investigators had set up several bogus accounts in June of last year, they failed to catch any of them.The Government Accountability Office report reads like something out of the ...

Crony Capitalism: Across the country, health insurers are asking for huge ObamaCare premium increases, blaming new costs imposed by the law. So why is a top industry CEO praising ObamaCare as being great for consumers?Humana CEO Bruce Broussard was on CNBC this week, along with Aetna CEO Mark ...

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